Presupposition Edited by Choon-Kyu Oh and David A. Dinneen (review)

214LANGUAGE, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 1 (1981) Presupposition. Edited by Choon-Kyu Oh and David A. Dinneen. (Syntax and semantics, 11.) New York: Academic Press, 1979. Pp. xv, 411. $32.00. Reviewed by D. Terence Langendoen, Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center* The study of presupposition has been fraught with disagreements and disputes ever since it was first undertaken, ninety years ago, by Gottlob Frege. Linguists have been interested in its study for little more than ten years, but their disputes and disagreements have been no less vigorous than those of philosophers. The very existence of presupposition as a property of sentences, distinct from entailment and implicature, is in dispute. Assuming that it exists, there is disagreement over whether to analyse it as a semantic or as a pragmatic notion, and over how to provide a suitable recursive definition for it (i.e. how to solve the projection problem for presupposition). The view that presupposition should be given up, as a distinct property of sentences, is represented in this volume by Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber, Ordered entailments: An alternative to presuppositional theories' (299-323), and by Lauri Karttunen and Stanley Peters, 'Conventional implicature' (1-56). W&S contend that 'presuppositional behavior' can be satisfactorily accounted for in semantic theory in which the entailments of a sentence form an ordered, rather than an unordered, set of objects (299). K&P, however, propose that presuppositions can all be re-analysed as preparatory conditions on speech acts, conversational implicatures, or as conventional implicatures (i.e. implicatures that 'arise ... from the conventional meanings ofwords and grammatical constructions that occur in [sentences]'; p. 2, n. 3). The view that presupposition exists as a distinct property of sentences is maintained by all the other contributors. Derek Bickerton, 'Where presuppositions come from' (235-48), holds that 'the manner in which presuppositions work ... is derived from syntactic ... facts' (247). ' However, Jerrold Katz, ? solution to the projection problem for presupposition' (91-126), -Ralph Weischedel , ? new semantic computation while parsing: Presupposition and entailment ' (155-82), Janet Fodor, 'In defense of the truth-value gap' (199-224), and S. K. Thomason, 'Truth-value gaps, many truth values, and possible worlds' (357-69), all support the view that presupposition is properly viewed as a semantic property of sentence types. 'On representing event reference' (325-55), by Philip Peterson, can also perhaps be put into this category. However , these papers differ on exactly what constitutes the set of semantic presuppositions of a sentence, and on what semantics is a theory of. The remaining papers all maintain that presupposition is properly viewed as a pragmatic property of sentence tokens. Jay Atlas, 'How linguistics matters to philosophy: Presupposition, truth, and meaning' (265-81), and Ruth Kempson , 'Presupposition, opacity, and ambiguity' (283-97), both argue specifically * I thank Jerrold Katz, Arnold Koslow, and especially Scott Soames for their help in the preparation of this review. 1 Bickerton's claim is less interesting than it seems, since he considers any difference in the relative acceptability of sentences to be a syntactic fact. REVIEWS215 for the non-ambiguity of sentences like The present king ofFrance is not bald, whose alleged ambiguity provides the basis of one of the classical arguments for the analysis of presupposition as a semantic property of sentence types. S.-Y. Kuroda, 'Katz and Langendoen on presupposition' (183-98), concludes that 'the notion of semantic presupposition, and correlatively absence of truth value ... are not theoretically grounded on reason, and their justification can perhaps rest only on the intuitions of the investigator' (198). Karttunen & Peters, along with Gerald Gazdar, ? solution to the projection problem' (57-89), Traugott Schiebe, 'On presuppositions in complex sentences' (127-54), and Choon-Kyu Oh and Kurt Godden, 'Presuppositional grammar' (225-34), all provide different solutions to the projection problem for pragmatic presupposition . Finally, Johan van der Auwera, 'Pragmatic presupposition: Shared beliefs in a theory of irrefutable meaning' (249-63), and James McCawley, 'Presupposition and discourse structure' (371-88), discuss various problems in the analysis of pragmatic presupposition. The book concludes with a useful 'Bibliography of works dealing with presupposition ' (389-403), by Ivan Sag and Ellen Prince, and three indices of dubious value.2 Katz observes, in his paper, that the burden of proof that...